House votes to extend deadline to ratify Equal Rights Amendment
WASHINGTON — House Democrats on Thursday moved to enshrine the decades-old Equal Rights Amendment into the Constitution, reviving a long-simmering cultural debate over whether the nation’s founding charter should guarantee equal rights to all citizens regardless of sex.
But the vote, to extend a deadline for ratification that expired in 1982, was largely symbolic.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, has said he is “not a supporter” of the measure — known as the ERA — and is highly unlikely to take it up in the Senate.
And Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a longtime supporter of the ERA who spent her early years as a lawyer fighting for its passage, may have delivered a death knell to the effort this week when she urged supporters to set aside their long-running campaign for ratification and start over.
“I would like to see a new beginning,” Justice Ginsburg said during an event at the Georgetown University Law Center on Monday. “I’d like it to start over. There’s too much controversy about latecomers.”
Justice Ginsburg’s comments gave a lift to opponents of the measure, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who said Thursday the deadline extension would be rejected by the Senate.
“It is clear the statutory period to have passed the ERA expired decades ago, and it would be necessary for it to be reintroduced to have constitutional viability,” Mr. Graham said in a statement.
The amendment is also mired in lawsuits.
The attorneys general of Alabama, Louisiana and South Dakota filed suit in December opposing ratification.
But the attorneys general of Virginia, Nevada and Illinois filed suit last month to force the amendment to be added to the Constitution.
Thursday’s House vote came 100 years after women won the right to vote and 48 years after Congress first approved the ERA in 1972, setting a deadline of 1979 for ratification.
When only 35 states had ratified it by 1979, Congress extended the deadline to 1982. But that deadline, too, passed with just 37 states — one short of the required 38 — having voted to ratify the amendment, amid an intense campaign led by Phyllis Schlafly, a proudly anti-feminist Republican, to block it.
Last month, Virginia became the 38th state, which prompted Thursday’s move to approve the deadline extension.
It passed by a vote of 232183, almost entirely along party lines.
Just five Republicans — Reps. John Curtis of Utah, Rodney Davis of Illinois, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Tom Reed of New York and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey — joined all Democrats in voting in favor.